Home automation for automatically controlling home appliances at home or remotely has almost reached a commercial use stage. At its early stage, the home automation separately controlled each home appliance by using a telephone or infrared rays, and did not connect the home appliances one another. However, there has been suggested a method for building a network of home appliances by using a communication means, and collectively managing the network by using a controller.
FIG. 1 is a structure view illustrating a general home network system. Referring to FIG. 1, a home network connects various digital home appliances so that a user can always enjoy convenient, safe and economic life services inside or outside the house.
As factors of the advent of the home network, refrigerators or washing machines called white home appliances have been gradually digitalized due to development of digital signal processing techniques, and new information home appliances have been made due to rapid development of home appliance operating system techniques and high speed multimedia communication techniques.
Here, an IT network is built to exchange data between a personal computer and peripheral devices or provide Internet services, and an AV network is built between home appliances using audio or video information. In addition, a living network is built to simply control home appliances, such as home automation or remote meter reading, and may be comprised of a refrigerator, washing machine, microwave oven, electric lamp, gas alarm, air conditioner and telephone.
The home network system includes a master device which is a home appliance for controlling an operation of the other home appliances or monitoring a status thereof, and a slave device which is a home appliance having a function of responding to the request of the master device and a function of notifying a status change according to properties of the home appliances or other factors. Here, the home appliances (or new devices) include home appliances for the living network service such as a washing machine and a refrigerator as well as home appliances for the IT network service and the AV network service.
The conventional home network system has never suggested an apparatus and method for configuring a new home appliance as a new slave device (or master device). Especially, the conventional arts have not taught an apparatus and method for requiring only a simple operation to general users who are not familiar with complicated mechanism of the home network system, and enabling the home network system to automatically recognize and configure a new home appliance.